For s short while now i have been involving myself with the open source project Agatha. Originally developed by Davy Brion for use in the company he works at, his company now graciously allowed Davy to open source it.

Being in the ICT world means working in a dynamic, fast moving industry. So any self respecting developer will spend quite some time keeping up with current developments.

But like normal people, I don't always feel like it. Not that its not interesting or anything, but I just got so many other things I want to do.

In those cases I need to get into a learning mood first. In order to get into "the zone" I usually utilize music to close myself off from my environment so I can fully focus on the subject. Lately I am listening to the soundtrack of Brutal Legend which just rocks.

So I was wondering, what do you use to get into that "learning groove".

In the 2009.2 release of the Aikido asp.net controls infragistics released the WebHierarchicalDataGrid. At the moment of writing it is still in CTP, but it will be officially release somewhere next week.

In combination with the WebHierarchicalDataSource displaying hierarchical data in the grid is a breeze. Since in the past i had to build a lot of these kind of views i dove right on it.

At work we have an application which uses Castle ActiveRecord 1.3. I have been wanting to upgrade to the latest version in trunk ever since the new Criterion API for NHibernate was introduced, however at the time, my pointy haired boss threw a wrench in that plan. Saying he wants a proven stable build. (in other words a Release Candidate).

A short while ago AR 2.0 was released and I rejoiced! So I downloaded the latest versions of AR, the Windsor container and DynamicProxy. And started updating.

For a while now I have been working with the AjaxControlToolkit. And recently I noticed people asking about how to have a percentage sign shown inside a Textbox being extended by the Masked Edit Extender.

After seeing some gruweling posts about using the OnBlur event to manually append an percentage sign to the text in the textbox I figured i'd blog about it.

Its really simple. For example if u set the mask value to: Mask="999.99#%" then the editor will always display the % sign after your masked input ( ___,__ % ).
Of course you can easily swap it around to the other side Mask="%#999.99" becomes (% ___,__ )